East Vs. West: Traffic

Wichitans often have the reputation of being terrible drivers, but is one side of town worse than the other? We asked “Which side of town has the worse traffic/drivers?” and you answered in our East or West: Which is your favorite blog and the results were 62% east side 31% west side and 7% saying we are all equally bad. Now the real question is what leads to these opinions?

Again, we have defined the borders as everything east of I-135 being the “East Side” with everything west of the river as “West Side” and the space in between is downtown which no one side can claim.

Traffic Volume

Part of the reason the east side gets a bad rap is the sheer volume of people that move through it. The east side of town is home to 6 of the 10 busiest intersections in town. These intersections include:

Construction

The respondents in our survey often cited the east side as having the most construction. It’s easy to bash on the East Kellogg Improvement Project, but keep in mind there is a corresponding West Kellogg Improvement Project as well. Oddly enough, the west side is home to the current majority of construction projects according to Wichita.gov’s weekly construction bulletin at the time of this article's publishing.

Combined, there are 20 street, highway, bridge and other projects deemed to have major traffic impacts. The west side of town was home to 12 of them. Now one thing to consider while you sit angry in the crawl of traffic along Kellogg is that construction means things are improving and getting better for our city as a whole.

General Driving Habits and Parking

Don't Be This Person

In our survey, it was often cited that east side drivers are always in a hurry to get somewhere and westside drivers just sort of mosey around. We don’t have any stats to honestly back up either of these claims, however, here are some funny quotes we gathered in our survey.

“Eastside drivers seem to think if you go 18 mph over the speed limit you'll get down Rock Road faster... You won't, I'll see you at the next stop light, Jerk.”

“West, they must be confused by the lack of horses pulling their vehicle.”

“Both. MERGING - why does this not happen? Also, we've turned the Orange Cone Slalom into an Olympic sport”

That last guy has a point, drivers in Wichita don’t seem to be fans of using their blinkers, and they consistently seem to be bad at parking (as pictured).